Ducksworth

IH Phoenix Corp Turkey Shoot

Aramis moved at a steady, purposeful pace toward the narrow funnel of earth and fencing, the soft crunch of dew-damp soil beneath his boots the only sound accompanying him. The morning light still painted everything in a serene glow — drifting petals, rippling wheat, the faint hush of the breeze.

It would have been almost peaceful. Almost. A low tremor stirred behind him. He slowed. Another tremor. He frowned slightly, glancing back over his shoulder—and froze.

The Greatspurs were no longer meandering.They were bearing down on him, en masse, heads lowered, wattles flapping with violent enthusiasm, talons digging trenches in the earth as they thundered toward him like feathered siege engines fueled by pure homicidal hunger. Aramis inhaled sharply. His eyes widened. His entire posture stiffened in a singular instant of frozen, horrified realization. Then—

He bolted. Not with calm tactical intent. Not with dignified urgency. But with the desperate, high-speed, self-preserving sprint of a man who has just discovered that physics and poultry have united to kill him.

“NONONONONO—!”

His boots hammered the ground as he tore down the funnel, coat flapping wildly behind him like a banner of pure regret. The breathless thuds of pursuing turkey-titans shook the earth so violently he nearly stumbled on the uneven path. He did not look back again. He refused to look back again. Nothing good existed behind him anymore — only feathers, fury, and the worst death imaginable. The kill zone ahead suddenly felt like the most beautiful place he had ever seen.

“WHY ARE THEY SO FAST?!” he shouted to absolutely no one, voice cracking in a way he would later deny.

And so Aramis sprinted for his life — a lone, panicked projectile hurtling straight into the ambush point as the Greatspur horde thundered after him with murderous delight.

IH Phoenix Corp Turkey Shoot

For several long seconds, Aramis didn’t move. The breeze tugged at the scattered corn rolling past his boots, each kernel bouncing downhill like a tiny herald of misfortune. Yumi’s grin still lingered in the air like perfume, and the Greatspur flock was beginning to take suspicious interest in the glittering trail she’d so enthusiastically deployed.

Aramis nodded once, very slowly.

“Yes, exactly, I'll lead them, Locke prepa-” Tap. A single kernel nudged the toe of his boot. He stared down at it. “…wait.” His head lifted.

“Ehh?!”

He snapped his gaze toward Yumi for an immediate explanation — only to find a Yumi-shaped puff of dust, the breeze already fraying its silhouette into nothing. Aramis blinked. He turned sharply toward Locke next — and saw absolutely nothing. Just a faint shimmer in the air where a jump-jet flare had been a moment earlier. Silence. Realization. A very deep, very private sigh.

“...Yappari...”

He straightened his coat, set his shoulders, adjusted his grip on his staff and without another word, began the solemn, inevitable doom walk toward the bottleneck and the enormous, increasingly interested turkeys below.

[Ryke - Dungeon] Languishing Large Loner

---

Remember Them, Not Me.

---

He never saw the Mammoth hit him. There was only the after. A single impossible moment where the world folded into a fist around him, crushing everything between heartbeats — and then the pain slammed through him so violently he forgot what bodies were supposed to feel like.

It lasted all of a second. Then it was gone. Not eased. Not numbed. Gone.

The mist swept in, warm and thick, smothering the agony before his mind could process it. What had been a scream inside him became a strange, distant quiet — like someone had reached into his chest and turned the volume down on himself. He lay on the floor, cheek against mirrored glass, unable to remember how he got there. Or how many bones were broken. Or which organs were leaking into places they shouldn’t.

His hearing rang — a high, sharp note that felt less like sound and more like pressure. His vision blurred into watercolor streaks. Shapes moved in frames, not in motion — Yumi in three broken fragments of movement, Evie flickering, Locke bursting in and out of vision like a glitch. Roscoe was a still shape in the corner. Aramis’s chest tightened, but even that felt wrong, loose, distant.

He tried to inhale. The air bubbled in his lungs. Wet. Heavy. Final.A cold certainty set in. He wasn’t going to survive this. Something pressed against the back of his skull — not literally, but in feeling. A soft warmth. A hush. Death, not as an ending, but as a Mother’s hand slipping fingers gently through a child’s hair. Comforting. Patient. Waiting.nHe should have let go. Anyone sane would have. But his mind — the only unbroken thing left — clung to one thought like a man clutching a lantern in the dark: If I’m dying anyway… then everything I have left is theirs.

He dragged his fingers across the floor. The movement sent a quiet cascade of wrongness through his torso, but the mist dulled it until it felt like it belonged to someone else. He didn’t rise — he couldn’t — but he pressed his palm to the cold mirrored glass, smearing blood he barely recognized as his own. His vision flickered again.

Evie, running toward him with her shoulder hanging wrong. Yumi, vaulting on a shattered leg just to buy someone a second. Locke, firing into illusions without hesitation. Roscoe, who had stood between disaster and his people until disaster won. Strangers, all of them — but in a way he had never expected to have.

His chest hitched, something like a sob catching behind the ringing. He let magic bleed out of him — not shaped, not guided, nothing but raw will and the last warmth of a life leaving him. He poured into the floor the only thing he had left to give: the memory of them.

Not words. Not commands. Just the emotional truth of what he’d witnessed — bravery, sacrifice, stubborn human love. His voice was barely a breath against the glass.

“…remember… them…”

A pause. A shudder. His fingers slipping.

“…not… him…”

His body sagged. His vision tunneled. Death’s soft hand brushed a thumb along the back of his head, soothing, inviting. He pressed his palm harder anyway. If this was all he had left — if this was the last imprint he ever made on a living world — then let it be this:

Protect them. Please. Protect them.

Nothing else mattered anymore.

---

Economy and Narration

OOC: Aramis, convinced of his inevitable death, puts everything of himself into his final act.

Actions:

1. Attempts to move and fails (severely injured; remains prone).

2. [Impressed Will] – [Intelligence C] + [Magic E] + [Enchanting F] + [Duration F] + [Range F] – Aramis pours his remaining will and magic into the Domain, attempting to interfere with Kavros’ control. Specifically, he tries to overwrite the Dungeon’s current directive of serving Kavros by impressing a competing directive: to prioritize and protect his allies instead of empowering Kavros and his magic.

3. Emotional directive: “Remember them. Not him.” – his last conscious effort is to make the Domain remember the party’s sacrifice over Kavros’ will.

Redshift Blues

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D O W N I N T H E D E P T H S
A J A X A N D V I N N Y P R O D U C T I O N

---

The hiss came first, then the air vanished. One second Jax was breathing smoke and fumes; the next, the room inhaled. A hollow whump that yanked the breath straight out of his chest and sent papers and dust swirling upward like startled ghosts, scattering tools on the floor. His lungs clenched on instinct; his hands clawed for balance as equilibrium slipped.

“—the fuck?!” The words came out thin and ragged. His chest burned, his ears popped. Panic hit before thought, that primal fear of vacuum, of hull breach, of death. He staggered toward the wall, coughing, eyes darting. The extinguisher’s roar filled the small room, dragging the smoke toward its nozzle in a long, spiraling ribbon until the air settled again. As the smoke cleared, its source became apparent. It was some apparently malfunctioning device on Jax’s desk. Vĩnh progressed slowly into the room, inching closer. The extinguisher pulled the device in. Vĩnh shut it off. The room was silent, save for the low hum of the Dullahan’s life-support catching up and the faint rattle of tools rolling on the deck.

Jax gasped for air and finally turned to the source of the noise, ready to curse whatever idiot had triggered — and froze. Vĩnh stood at his desk, extinguisher still in hand, her chrome catching the flickering light. For a moment he just stared, jaw slack, disbelief flickering into fury.

“You—” His voice cracked. “You did this?! You just—walked in here and—” He choked mid-sentence, coughed again, half from smoke, half from rage. “You can’t— you don’t—” His hand jerked toward her, trembling. “You don’t come in here!” The words tumbled over each other now, spit and breath fighting for the same space. “You don’t— you can’t! You!” His voice rose, frayed and hoarse. “You trying to kill me now? huh!? Don’t need air yourself, so who gives a damn if the rest of us choke!?”

He took a staggering step towards her, eyes wild. “Any excuse to sneak in again, that it? Spy on me, check my work, see what the meatbag’s building?” His tone cracked between mockery and venom. “Just couldn’t resist, could you?”

He kicked a crate aside; it clanged off the wall and rolled into the corner. “I had it handled! You— Y’think I’d torch my own room?! You think I don’t know what I’m doing?!” He gestured violently toward the corridor, chest heaving, voice raw. “Get. Out!”

The last echo of his shout lingered. His hand stayed outstretched a moment longer — shaking — before he realized how hard he was breathing, and how hard he had kicked that crate. He looked away, jaw tight, pulse hammering against his throat, and his toes. Vĩnh stepped back and held up the extinguisher emphatically. She exclaimed, “I’m just doing my job! Smoke is dangerous in small spaces.” She shook her head in a mixture of indignation and confusion, and added, “You think I should know psychically that your room is not on fire, huh?”

If the smoke hadn’t made Jax’s hair already look like he was physically fuming, his shaking from the audacity Vĩnh showed him definitely completed the look. His fists clenched at his sides and his shoulders slowly raised up to mirror his ears. “Get out! Getout, getout, getout! GET. OOOOUT!!”

Vĩnh stood firm. Her expression tensed as she looked past Jax at the rest of his room. She shook her head. “Either way, I’ll need to clean your room soon.” She gestured around the room with her free hand, “It’s filthy already.”

How could she just stand there and talk so nonchalantly after almost killing a guy? It must have been, quite obviously, one of those damn cybernetic thingamabobs. “There is absolutely no way in this damn hell of a pocket of space I’m letting you in here to get your hands all up in my stuff.”

Vĩnh put her free hand on her hip and sighed. “Then, you need to put them away when I need to clean here. You understand, it’s my job to clean the whole ship, right?” Her tone remained firm, yet grew gentler, in a way which approached condescension. “I have to clean here eventually. And I have to do a routine cleaning regularly. If I don’t clean in here, I’m not doing my job.”

“No!” he spouted like it countered the whole conversation. “I don’t want you in here! I don’t want it “cleaned”.” which he made to emphasis with actual air-quotes. “I just don’t want— you… Just no! Clean the rest of the ship but leave me be!”

Vĩnh shook her head again. “No. I can work with your schedule and your preferences. But right now, you get to choose when I clean this room. Not if. If you want me to not clean here, I need an order from Captain MacLaine telling me so. Otherwise, I am not doing my job in here. Do you see the problem, Jack?”

Jax’s chest rose and fell in a quickening rhythm. “It’s. JAX! With an X! And if you want to clean in here, you get ol’ Cap’n to tell me himself! As far as I’m concerned, my space, my choice!”

“Ja…x. Jax,” she repeated to herself, clearly chewing on the word to get a feel for pronouncing it. “Okay, Jax. Did Captain MacLaine tell you that your room was exempt from cleaning? Or, you know, this looks like a storage room. Did he give you explicit permission to use this room as a work area and quarters?” Vĩnh cocked her head expectantly.

He nodded along with it. Mouthing it out as she spoke the words in big movements, but when she moved on to the questions.. “Well. He didn’t exactly express that I wasn’t not not allowed to not stay in here…?” Confused, he shook his head slightly “I’m allowed!” He paused, from the looks on his face, he was obviously thinking incredibly hard, both to untangle that last sentence and also on his current predicament. His shoulders dropped, as did his volume. “But… I don’t want to not be allowed…”

Vĩnh nodded sympathetically. “Then, you should be careful. Captain MacLaine comes from a corporate background, you know. I don’t know how your background is, but corpos are rigid with us working people. I have to do my job. You have to do yours. We both have to minimize our liability in the case of malfunction or accident, you understand?” She spoke slowly, making a clear effort to enunciate each word such that there would be no ambiguity. “If I don’t clean, I’m liable for damage caused by what I don’t clean up. If there’s something on your floor that causes rust, anything flammable that could get tracked around, and so on. If I don’t clean, I’m not doing my job, and I get in trouble for that. And I don’t know or understand much about your work, and I want to respect it and respect your space within the confines of what I am able to do according to my duty, but in order for me to do that, you have to work with me. And you know, I can’t tell you what to do, but looking around here—” She gestured around the room, towards the myriad loose parts and compounds. “—and knowing you work with explosives, I can tell you that I see liability issues for you as well. If you want, I can look up the Jovian standard for what constitutes safe practice around volatile substances.”

Jax jolted at the mention of ‘looking up standards.’ Whether it was due to the fact he had never actually realised there were standards, or whether he chose to ignore them, or that he simply didn’t even know what Vinny meant. Still, the reaction was clearly visible. “I—ah… I guess you could clean up just a little bit. Just—.. Er… Don’t move stuff? And I want to be here when it happens!”

Vĩnh offered a polite smile. “Give me a day this week, and I will come do that. Believe me, I don’t want to have an accident with explosives. We’ll work together, you’ll have a clean work area and room, and everything will go back exactly as it was before, just cleaned.” After pausing a moment, she cleared her throat and concluded, “Anyway, I don’t want to keep you. Let me know if there is anything you need!”

@enmuni

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Levi Orienko

---

Bahram’s energy washed over Levi again — bright, loud, warm in the way fire was warm when you got too close, that slight burn on your face as the flames lick at you.

“Cool! Fireworks are banned, but we can eat—what foods do you like? I’ll treat!”

Levi froze, suddenly the warmth had turned to ice. Food. Not rations or gruel, Not the thin grey paste he had swallowed because it kept him upright. Actual food — the kind people had opinions about, fought about. He blinked once, slowly. The ground felt suddenly very interesting.

“I… don’t really know,” he admitted under his breath. A tiny pause, almost guilty. He shifted his pack, not out of discomfort with Bahram — but with the question itself. “You can pick,” Levi added, softer. “It’d be better if you did.”

Bahram barreled forward into politics next — uprisings, monarchists, alliances, a handful of acronyms Levi had never seen written anywhere. The words poured out of him with practiced familiarity. Levi listened because he listened to everything. But the meaning went right past him. He frowned a little, eyes narrowing in that quiet, confused way he had. “I… have no idea what any of that means,” he said honestly. No shame. Just a small shake of his head. “Sorry,” he let out a small breath. He didn’t pretend to belong to a world he had never been taught.

Movement to his side brushed the edge of his awareness. Lukas was still there — calm, watching, part of the same circle of noise — but Levi didn’t split himself trying to manage two conversations. He just kept his body open enough that he wasn’t excluding anyone. It was the best he knew how to do.“We should go in soon,” Levi said quietly, eyes flicking toward the hall doors. He didn’t move first. He waited — for Bahram’s lead, or for the moment to feel right. That was enough.

@LladyLloki@Letter Bee

IH Phoenix Corp Turkey Shoot

The morning sun crested the ridge in a slow, gilded sweep, its first light spilling across the fields in drifting ribbons. Pollen and stray petals caught the glow, floating like pale sparks shaken from some slumbering giant’s breath.

A soft breeze threaded through the blossoms and grain alike—gentle, cool, almost ceremonial in the way it brushed against Aramis’ coat. As if some unseen mother-spirit of the land passed a hand over her children, soothing them before the inevitable chaos to come.

Below, the Greatspur flock lumbered through the fields in ponderous waves. Massive bodies swayed and thumped with each step, feathers shuddering like banners caught in a storm. Their gobbling rolled across the countryside in deep, resonant quakes—an absurd chorus for creatures too foolish to inspire anything but ridicule, yet too large to dismiss entirely.

Aramis stepped up beside Locke, his boots sinking into the damp soil, dew soaking quietly into the leather while the morning light traced a pale outline along the folds of his coat. His gaze followed the flock’s destructive wobble with the bemused detachment of a man long resigned to this world’s insistence on presenting threats that defied all dignity. One hand rested on his staff; the other stayed tucked in his pocket, fingers curled, his stance steady despite the thunderous absurdity below.

“We should consider shaping the field before committing,” he said, glancing sidelong at Locke, the sunrise reflected faintly in his eyes. After a beat, he looked back toward the land. “A trap might serve us better than a direct charge.”

He lifted his staff slightly, pointing toward the far end of the fields where the land dipped and narrowed between wooden fences. “Those irrigation trenches… and the carts stacked along the fence line. They could form a bottleneck if we guide the birds through here. Narrow their approach enough, and they’ll have no choice but to funnel straight in.”

His attention drifted back to the slope, expression sharpening as petals drifted lazily past on the breeze.
“Of course, that would require someone to draw their attention first. Turkeys this size will chase anything that looks even remotely like a challenge.”

He studied the terrain, then the flock.
“It could be anyone, really.”

He shifted his stance as the breeze ruffled his coat again, sending loose blossoms drifting past his shoulder like wandering thoughts.

“In any case,” Aramis finished, tone returning to its usual evenness, “it’s only one option. If either of you prefer another approach, I’ll adjust. Best to lay out choices before we commit ourselves to being flattened.”

He exhaled softly, a thin mist leaving his lips before the warmth of the rising sun swallowed it. His eyes followed a few petals dancing across the ridge before they spiraled down toward the marching birds below.

[Ryke - Dungeon] Languishing Large Loner

The hall bucked and groaned like it had a spine as the Mammoths feet thundered within the chamber. Light fractured across a hundred mirrored surfaces, every reflection of the beast twisting into new impossible angles. His mind twisted between two facets of his job as support, help the charge and to take down the beast or… Evie’s voice still rang in his ears through the noise — “Find and crush a rune node.”

Crush it.
The words looped in his mind, but his instincts pushed back almost immediately.
What node? There was no network here, no visible lattice to break. Everything about this room was feeling before form. A physical field responding to emotion, to will — to memory.

Kavros’ earlier words slid through the cracks in his concentration.
The walls remember what I desire.
They remember every lie.

He blinked behind his fogged glasses, the world catching up to him in flashes — the runes pulsing, the mist thickening when Kavros spoke, the floor itself shifting like it was breathing in his commands. The realization came fast, almost violent in its clarity.

He could almost feel the weight of it: centuries of thought and grief pressed into glass, repeating because no one had ever taught it anything new. The Domain didn’t attack them out of cruelty — it was imitating the will it knew best.
And Evie’s order — “find the node” — wasn’t wrong, not really. The node wasn’t a place. It was a mind.

His heart kicked hard. His thoughts blurred and reformed around a single, dizzying hypothesis:
If the Domain obeyed the will of whoever impressed themselves on it… then maybe it could be impressed again.

He grounded his staff, the sound ringing sharp against the mirrored floor, and drew a slow, steady breath, closing his eyes. Every part of him wanted to overthink it — equations, mana flow, harmonic interference. But the truth of it wasn’t math; it was meaning. The Domain remembered Kavros’ hunger, his sorrow, his dominance. It could just as easily remember something else.

Aramis reached for the quiet places in himself that had kept him alive this long — a calm cup of lavender tea, the quiet that balanced panic, the silence that made study possible, the stubborn belief that understanding was always better than ignorance. He shaped that calm into intent and fed it into his magic.

”Remember… purpose,” he murmured, voice trembling but clear.
“Remember peace. Remember thatt you were meant to cleanse, not that which you’ve become.”

The staff answered with a low hum, vibration climbing up through his arms. He let it run, threading his own mana through the ambient pulse — not to dominate it, but to blend, like ink seeping into water. He used the same careful focus he applied to enchantments: intention as pattern, patience as anchor.

Light rippled around him, faint but visible, as he offered the Domain a new rhythm — slower, steadier, built from understanding rather than fear. Whether it listened or not was beyond him. His job was to try.

The staff’s hum deepened once more before fading. He exhaled, eyes opening to the mirrored hall.
“If you remember everything,” he said softly to the air itself,
“then remember this.”

---

Economy and Narration

OOC: Aramis trusts his team to do their part while trying to change the very domain itself.

Actions:

1. Analysis — Aramis re-evaluates the Domain’s behavior using his Intellect (C) and Arcana (F) knowledge, deducing that the Domain records and mirrors will and emotion rather than mechanical magic.

2. Invocation — Using Intelligence (C ) + Magic (E) + Enchanting (F) + Duration (F) + Range (F), he projects a counter-intent into the Domain: calm, purpose, remembrance of cleansing rather than corruption.

3. Brace — Maintains focus and composure, awaiting the Domain’s reaction to his attempt at emotional/magical redirection.

Metropolis of Superheroes

So should I still respond to the last GM post or no?

@Azure Bubbles

Definitely. It's still canon as far the RP goes and it allows us to see which kiosk you go for etc.

Metropolis of Superheroes

Sounds perfect to me @Birdboy!

[Ryke - Dungeon] Languishing Large Loner

The sweetness in the air thickened until it coated the back of his throat. Aramis swallowed, slow, the motion deliberate. Power offered so freely had a taste — always pleasant first, always cloying after. Kavros’ voice echoed through the mirrored hall, heavy with promise. The runes flared with it, pulsing in quiet agreement, and the mist curled low at their feet like it wanted to listen. The scholar in him wanted to listen too — to take it apart, piece by piece, to see how it worked. The rest of him remembered what happened to people who couldn’t stop at curiosity.

He didn’t step forward. Didn’t even shift his weight. The others had already tightened formation, and he wasn’t about to be the one to break it. He let the staff rest upright against his shoulder, eyes fixed on the reflection of the throne rather than the thing that sat in it. He felt safer that way. The offer gnawed at him all the same. Secrets. Knowledge. Power. It was exactly the kind of bait that hooked people who read too much and thought too little. His fingers flexed against the wood, the thought finding its way out in a low voice meant for no one but himself:

“Shortcuts leave gaps,” he murmured, the words rough as gravel. “And gaps get people killed.” He wasn’t sure if he was reminding himself, or answering the offer. Maybe both. He adjusted his glasses, eyes flicking once toward Evie, then Locke, then Yumi’s stillness reflected a dozen times over. Everyone was braced, measured, waiting for the first wrong move. Aramis exhaled through his nose, quiet but steady. “There’s no wisdom in learning fast,” he added softly, the faintest edge of disdain curling the last word. And with that, he fell silent again — not defiant, but immovable. Whatever power sat on that throne would find no eager student here.